Corrections in Ink: A Memoir

by Keri Blakinger

I’m only ten minutes from where I’m going, and it’s cold outside. The sun is deceptive; it looks like a nice upstate New York morning, but really it’s December and the wind is whipping up from Ithaca’s gorges. I stop walking and push my fingers deep into my pockets in search of a Parliament. In a minute, there will be police, with questions and handcuffs. By tomorrow, my scabby-faced mugshot will be all over the news as the Cornell student arrested with $150,000 of smack. I will sober up to a sea of regrets. My dirty clothes and late English paper—one of the last assignments I need to graduate—will be the least of my problems.

Both my first line and the first time I will not finish my reading assignment. I am tightly wound, a taut rubber band of perfectionism and self-destruction. And I am about to make things worse.

Before that, I dabbled with cutting, but instead settled on starving myself. I was obsessive and anxious. Overachieving and talkative. Driven, but not stable. To anyone paying close attention, it can’t have been any surprise where it all led. I grew up in the suburbs of Lancaster, not far from the colonial row houses of downtown or the rolling cornfields a few miles out. It was a fifty-five-thousand-person city, but in the heart of Amish country—so you might pass by a drug deal on one street and a horse-and-buggy on the next.

That year I began having trouble making friends at school. It seemed I’d hit the age when mean girls are just learning how mean they can be. The rest of elementary school, I spent a lot of time crying in the bathroom as I learned it, too. I was smart and athletic, but not in the cool way; at recess I played sports with the boys or sat in a corner and read. I talked incessantly at adults, but was completely at sea with my peers. Admittedly, my unfortunate decision to wear pigtail braids throughout all of fourth grade probably did not help anything. All the grade school fashion sense and social cues seemed cloudy to me, and the hours I spent devouring everything from Isaac Asimov to Shakespeare did not teach me witty retorts to cafeteria insults.

They were, but by that point it didn’t matter: The ice-cold world of figure skating was beginning to consume my life. I’d taken my first lesson a few years earlier—maybe third grade or so—after my mother spotted a newspaper article about skating classes at the local ice rink. She clipped it out and showed it to me: Was I interested? I said sure. The rink itself was an utter dump, a former iron works factory with no heat or bathrooms and a rust-lined roof that would drip bronzy spots onto the ice, as if warning us of its slow plans to collapse. Despite the utterly unwelcoming arena and my intense hatred of the cold, I fell in love. Inside the ring of the plexiglass barrier was a different world. It was solitude, even on a crowded day. Life moved faster here. There were no parents, the skate-less elders relegated to rinkside.

I’m not sure what was the final straw, the thing that pushed me over the edge from being miserable in one half of my life to being overtly self-destructive in all of it. Whether it was hormones or budding mental illness, I had simply become volatile. Not overnight, but in fairly short order.

They say that eating disorders are about control, but it is not that straightforward. They are also about self-destruction that feels just like success. I wanted to waste away, slowly and tragically—and in the meantime, I wanted to win. Or at least land a double Axel.

Jail architects did away with that kind of design more than a decade earlier, and the guards always told us it was because the bars on each cell made it too easy for people to kill themselves; bars, poles, anything desperate people could tie a makeshift noose to represented a risk. All the newer jails had isolating, solid doors instead of sliding gates. Those doors were supposed to be safer, but the old-fashioned gates meant we could always talk to each other. The guards could lock us all in, but we would never be entirely alone. Our cells ran down the outside walls of the building, with long horizontal windows at the top where we could not see out of them. If we stood on our bunks to peer out, the guards would yell at us. We wanted to spy on the visitors in the parking lot or gape at the wild turkeys across the highway; they wanted us to sit the fuck down and shut up.

I would say there’s some bizarre assumption that you know everything you need to know, but that’s not it: it’s simply that no one cares if you know. The system does not care if you understand it. If you are lucky, the women around you do.

It wasn’t like being a fish out of water; it was more like being a freshwater fish in a brackish, clouded pond. I’d spent enough time traveling through drug circles that, even though I didn’t know most of them on the outside, the people here were my people. But no one behaved the same in jail, where we were all bound by a new and secret set of rules and mores. In this pond, all the light refracted differently, and everything was slightly toxic.

The first time I threw up seems like such a pivotal moment, and yet I do not remember it. But I can imagine. I would have been twelve at the time. I must’ve pulled back my light brown hair—it was long then—and haltingly forced my finger down my throat, retching and heaving a few times before I was successful. Afterward, I would have cautiously peeked out of the middle school bathroom stall, checking that the coast was clear before I scuttled across the tiled floor to the sink to wash the vomit from my hand. I probably took one of the little brace brushes and pushed out the tiny chunks of regurgitated food—or at least the visible ones. Then, I must have looked in the mirror at my watery eyes and red cheeks, and decided it was a good idea to do this whole routine again. And again, and again, and again. I didn’t dive in all at once; it started as an occasional thing, like a social smoker who only lights up at the bar. Except there was nothing social and no warm fuzzy feeling after, just a fleeting dizziness and an empty sense of victory. Bulimia is by nature a solitary task—which made it well-suited for a pre-teen with strict parents and few friends.

I don’t know the exact day that things changed, when those occasional glimpses at self-destruction became a pit bull I could not control, or when my escape hatch became the thing I wanted to escape from. But it was definitely sometime in ninth grade. Early in the school year—or maybe even the summer before—I started swapping out breakfast for coffee and lunch for a bottle of Crystal Light. Almost without realizing it, I created unwritten codes for myself: no meat, no pasta, no milk except as creamer, no cheese except grated Parmesan, no candy except sugar-free Jolly Ranchers, and no ice cream—unless I planned a stealthy trip to the bathroom afterward. I never called these things rules; I saw them at first as goals or guideposts. If I achieved them, I could be happy; if I strayed from them, I would be riddled with anxiety.

On the ice, I suddenly had everything I needed or wanted, everything I’d worked for. But it had all come so quickly that it simply did not feel real. Every time I landed and looked down at the clean edge, it felt like a fluke, a victory I did not deserve. And it scared me. Plus, on top of the inexplicable windfall, there was this: I couldn’t feel the jumps. I was landing them, but I knew they weren’t in my muscle memory. And when it really counts—in competition—you have nothing but muscle memory.

When it was all over, I got on the scale and was thrilled to discover I’d lost almost fifteen pounds. When I finally got back on the ice, I was horrified to discover I’d lost my jumps. I could do the double loops, flips, and Lutzes I’d been doing for years, but the bigger jumps I’d worked so hard for had vanished, replaced by failed attempts that came up a quarter-turn short every time. After a few panicked days of despair, the double Axel came back and eventually—months later—the triple Salchow. But the rest never did. In retrospect I guess that was the first thing I’d ever lost to an addiction.

Then, she put a stamp on it, waved it around to show all of us, and handed it over for outgoing mail. Blackburn picked it up, read the envelope, and promptly flipped the fuck out, running up and down the hallway telling the other guards about this incendiary act, and demanding to know: “Do I have to mail this?!” She was so short that, from our cells, we could only see the graying top of her head as she buzzed angrily back and forth. “Brandy,” I whispered, “I think you mean Jezebel. Gizabel isn’t a word. Jezebel is a biblical whore.” She was thrilled at the input: “Now I’ll sound smarter when I cuss her out next time.” She grinned conspiratorially, and we all watched Blackburn continue to flip out in the hallway.

She was one of the few things I’d done right in my addiction, something I’d kept alive even when I was trying to die. But now she, like so much else in my life, was gone. She’d been my failproof companion, and I’d lost her. That should have been the reality check I needed. But it wasn’t—not yet. Coming back to the sharp corners of real life after a blurry decade of drug use is a process.

spent my first night in the MIT student center, where the security guards left me alone, probably mistaking me for the sort of sleep-deprived overachiever I had once been. In the nights that followed, I slept on couches, in alleys, and once, on the rooftop of the Harvard English Department. It was a warm night, but a lonely place. I can’t even remember if there were sounds or raindrops or distant chatter from the nearby cafe; I am guessing there were not, but in any case, my own echoing emptiness would have drowned it out. I learned quickly that there’s an intrinsically desolate feeling to being homeless. It was something I did not expect, and it cut far deeper than the simple, logistical difficulties and social stigmas of being dirty and unhoused. There’s something specific about not having a place where you are welcome or safe when the sun goes down.

Briefly, I tried stealing: With a couple older comrades, I would swipe books from one store, exchange them for CDs at another, then sell the CDs as used at third stop for $5 a pop. Given the risk and the time commitment, it was hardly worth it. So I started turning tricks. It was quite a leap—I’d only had sex with a guy once at that point, and only a few times with a woman. Both were still awkward and new. But that changed after some scruffy teenager at the Pit introduced me to Mary Jane, a skinny white female pimp with a crack problem. She was just a few years older than me, and we had an on-the-go interview, strolling down the Cambridge sidewalk as she looked me over, asked what I would and wouldn’t do, and explained the rules of Boston’s Chinatown circa 2002.

Her words spilled out fast and intense, in a thick Boston accent always trimmed with a hint of anger. She could see I was not taking this seriously. But how could I? The outcomes seemed impossible, and the rules felt like a dark and absurd gym class—not high-risk, underage street prostitution. I assumed she was exaggerating to keep me in line, but now I know she probably wasn’t.

My first trick was uneventful, or at least that is how I chose to remember it. If I was nervous, I buried it. If I was terrified or if he hurt me, I forgot. Looking back now, I do not remember having any emotions. I only remember the stars. In the many nights I would spend for years to come having sex in strange alleys and rusty cars and shitty motels across the East Coast, I would always count the stars through every trick. If I could not see the stars, I would count ceiling tiles or specks on the floor. If I could not do that, I would close my eyes and count twinkling points of light in my mind. From inside some sad man’s car in Chinatown, I suspect I could not see any stars that night. But I remember them anyway.

For all the years I did drugs I was almost never single. Feeding an addiction is easier as a two-person task, with a literal partner in crime. Those relationships—usually with men, usually older—were always tough and intense, frequently abusive, and filled with overwrought declarations of undying love, or hate. Alex was no exception, and the emotional riot of early sobriety combined with the fallout from my arrest only ratcheted up the dramatics and passion.

Almost desperately, I stayed busy. I got straight A’s, but still I veered off track. Through my new sober friends, I met another girl in early recovery who seemed intent on veering off track, too. Like me, Katie had gotten into heroin young and cleaned up just in time for college. She was slim, with bright eyes and long sandy hair, and though she wasn’t living in the sober dorm, she knew everyone there. It can’t have been more than a couple months into my freshman year when she came up with a suggestion: We should be strippers. She’d seen a tiny classified ad in the student newspaper—which advertised everything from dishwashing to porn—and she’d already gotten the requisite clothes and shoes. It would be quick money, once a week.

Over time, I expanded the horizons of my sex work: All-nude clubs. Fetish parties. Photo shoots. Videos. Escorting. Things just barely this side of legal. I told myself it was fun and empowering. And sometimes it was. But, eventually, it wasn’t. Charging men for access to your sexuality is only empowering when they follow the rules, when they do not push the boundaries. When they do not remind you that, in the end, they are bigger, and older, and can call the shots. But ultimately that wasn’t the biggest problem; the biggest problem was where it led. Or where I let it lead—back to darkness and decay.

By the time school let out, I’d already stopped attending. Despite all the drug use, this was actually a first. I had never outright skipped college classes before. I’d always dropped them in time, or simply taken the whole semester off if I knew I was too entrenched in drugs to pass. That was part of how I’d walked away from Rutgers with straight A’s. And in my mind, those grades were key: As long as I was not failing my classes, I could always tell myself there was a chance it would be okay in the end. I was frequently not committed to living, and often wanted to just decay or implode. But I always told myself there was some escape valve as long as I still had the possibility of finishing school, of going back on the beaten path. But when I failed my classes, that escape valve slammed shut.

And while I was not still actively trying to kill myself, I was not exactly trying to live, either. I was just drifting, like debris floating down a gorge stream.

In life, so much of who we are is defined by the choices we make, how we see the world, and how we relate to the people around us. Solitary takes away all that. We may call it SHU or segregation or medical observation, but whatever words we use are a shorthand for the truth, a coded way of saying: You are nothing, and now you have nothing. Your world is only a tangle of dreams and reality drifting through the sterile air of a nine-by-six coffin. On the fourth day, Tompkins County finally sent over proof we’d already been tested for tuberculosis, and we were cleared for general population. Apparently, that was the only thing they’d been waiting on: a set of forms that took ten seconds to email or maybe a minute to fax.

Despite the quiet chaos of solitary, she was coherent and sometimes even cheerful—living like she knew some secret to the universe that I could not learn. For that, I faulted myself. The truth, though, is that there is no right way to respond to torture. Experts who study solitary confinement link it to anxiety, memory problems, sleep issues, anger, and disordered thinking. Some people experience “isolation panic,” like the dark wave that swept me off my feet. Some people handle it just fine, and others deteriorate slowly. To me, it felt like unraveling—but looking back it also feels like a turning point, a moment at which I began to see how broken the system could be, and how much it could break a person.

The major sighed dramatically and rolled her eyes, as if my request were simply a further indication of my guilt. Until that moment, I would have thought she could not—or as a woman, would not—do that. Until that moment, I still did not fully grasp how a jail could become its own kingdom, ruled by a petty monarch. Until that moment, I did not understand: They can do whatever they want to you and they do not really need proof or justification. Who are you going to tell? It seemed like the people in charge all thought we had gotten one over on them, and they were willing to break all the rules to get back at us.

My head snapped up in shock, and that is when I realized: Behind bars, there are no rules. Sure, there is a rulebook and there are things you cannot do. But when it matters, no one is watching. I should have figured this out in jail—and after they cut off my hair I learned they could do whatever they wanted there. But that jail was so small that all the petty injustices seemed anecdotal, a series of errant actions not representative of the bigger picture. Prison was the bigger picture. There were hundreds of women and hundreds of guards, and all the same problems, but on a larger scale. All the futility, the small cruelties, the refusal to see us as fully human—it was not a flaw in the system. It was the system.

In New York—like in a lot of other states—the prisons were mostly put in rural communities, often as an attempted economic development program for struggling towns that once relied on factories and mills. The thought was that the state institutions would bring in stable jobs, help local businesses, and revive these dying outposts. That didn’t always happen—but it did skew the demographics behind bars so that dozens of prisons sat in heavily white communities out in the country but held thousands of Black and brown people from the city.

But the woman next me in the draft line got that—not the specifics, necessarily, but the generalities. And she also understood what it meant: If you put prisons in a place where it’s harder for Black and brown people to do time, and they get written up more often, then they’ll go to solitary more often, and it’ll be harder to get out because they won’t be able to make parole. A sprawling New York Times investigation laid these connections bare in 2016, with data analyses proving the disciplinary infractions and parole approvals, and deep reporting linking it to the makeup of the staff and the parole board members. At one upstate unit—the Clinton men’s prison near the Canadian border—reporters found that only one of the 998 guards was Black, that Black prisoners were almost four times as likely to get sent to solitary, and that they spent on average thirty-five more days there than white prisoners. And since disciplinary records are a huge factor in parole decisions, Black inmates unsurprisingly made their first shot at parole less frequently.

In prison, the forecast is always rainclouds and thunderstorms, ominous and gray like the cinderblock walls around you. No matter how dark things have gotten, the people who’ve been there longer can offer hair-raising tales of even darker possibilities that lie ahead. Those things don’t always come to pass, but the worst seems to happen just often enough to justify a never-ending cascade of anxiety: If you are in jail, you can go to prison. If you are in prison, you can go to The Place. If you’re in The Place, they can take away your water.

And then there were the Tubbs and Washingtons of the world, who were already distant and unknowable by the time I met them. I never learned about their pasts or their problems. But once I understood the broad strokes, in some ways the details didn’t matter. The whole premise of prison began to seem absurd: Locking hundreds of traumatized and damaged women in together and threatening them constantly with additional punishments is not rehabilitation. It is not corrections. It is not public safety. It is systemic failure.

But that day, we had a good officer. When he came in for his shift, he saw Washington and a few of her friends cooking together in the common room, hogging the hot plates so no one else could make food. And he issued an order: “It’s Thanksgiving. If you’re cooking, you’re cooking for the whole damn unit.” So they did. The rest of us got together and donated commissary items. Supplies were limited, and spices weren’t allowed—except what we got on the prison black market, smuggled out of the mess hall in strip-search gloves. When it was all done, they shouted, “Get your bowls! Get your bowls!” We lined up at the common room tables and gaped. Despite the lack of tools and the hodgepodge of ingredients, the result was amazing: pasta salad, spiced cabbage, rice, yams, turkey, cranberry sauce, green beans, macaroni and cheese, and ten or fifteen different kinds of cakes and pies. Most of it was a little orange because Sazón is the number one spice in prison, but it tasted so good, and no one fought, no one stole, no one got sent to SHU.

Before she got her job in the gym, Stacy had worked as the inmate grievance coordinator—a position she eventually lost as a result of one of her many trips to The Place. But from that gig, she’d learned all about the petty and egregious wrongs that went on behind the walls—and she’d racked up disciplinary tickets for trying to help. Aside from 109.10, one of the other cardinal rules of prison was that you couldn’t help anyone with their legal case. The first time I heard that, I was shocked—it seemed like a brazen admission that prison officials were actively working to thwart justice if it involved incarcerated people. But it was right there in the rulebook: 180.17. If you got caught with someone else’s paperwork on you, you were going to The Place. Stacy didn’t care. “It’s not right! That’s not justice,” she told me one night at the gym. “What’s the average reading level in here—fifth grade maybe? Some people can’t read in English at all!” Unlike most jailhouse lawyers, she worked for free, secreting away legal files in her pants, hiding them in books, stashing them between other papers.

Wide-eyed, I just listened in wonder. In prison, the stakes were so high, it was one thing to take a risk for yourself—hoarding contraband makeup or smuggling cinnamon from the kitchen—but it was another thing entirely to take a risk for some free-world concept like justice. So many people lost the will for it. I sure felt like I had. For a year, I’d been living my life in fear of solitary. I wouldn’t do anything to attract attention lest the Powers That Be decide to retaliate. Even when the jail had cut off my hair, I hadn’t filed any grievances, formal complaints, or lawsuits—mostly because of the unspoken threat of The Place. It loomed over everything, unpredictable and terrifying, like a sea monster rising up from the deep, ready to lash out with a slimy tentacle and drag us into the dark waters one by one. I wanted to hide in the cabin. But here was Stacy, standing on the deck, hands on her hips in defiance.

The sudden vitriol stunned me into silence. I opened my mouth, ready with some sly snark—then closed it again as I remembered: Doctors could write disciplinary tickets, too.

The thought hit me with a stinging clarity I would have missed a year earlier. Then, I would have seen it as another unfortunate thing that happened to another unfortunate person, but now I finally understood something incredibly basic about life: chance applies to you, too. If there is a chance something might occur, it actually fucking might. You might get arrested, you might go to prison, you might catch something from a dirty needle.

On the one hand, that meant I now seemed to register other people’s pain more clearly, maybe because I understood how easily it could have happened to me. But on the other hand, that meant that I saw risk everywhere.

Soon, I grew anemic and pale, and started losing hair, then losing weight. My closest friends began telling people it was chemo; even on a unit full of women who’d carved whole lives around doing drugs, hepatitis still held too much stigma, and they wanted to protect me. But they could only do so much: If I simply wanted to know whether this was normal, there was no remedy for that. When you’re in prison, you can’t go get a second opinion, scour the internet for more information, or call up some friend of a friend who’s a nurse and can offer a quick hack or dash of reassurance. Figuring out the best course of action feels like complete guesswork—and you can only take the word of a doctor who works for the same system that didn’t want to treat you in the first place.

We’d been through some of the worst moments of our lives together. She’d loved me when I couldn’t love myself, and blindly accepted me when everyone else had judged. And ever since that first night in jail, I’d dreamed of her coarse black fur and musty hound smell, counting down the days till I could hear her familiar bark. Now, she didn’t even know me at all. The truth sat heavy in my stomach, like a too-big slice of the saddest cheesecake ever.

For some people, privilege can be easy to doubt because at the most granular level it is tough to prove:

But I can say for sure that the color of my skin greased the wheels of so many of the moments that made that forgiveness possible. Everybody should get the second chances I got, but most people do not. That’s not to downplay anything or say that it was easy. Addiction and arrest, going to prison and getting back out—these are the sorts of things that are hard for everyone. But they are so much harder for people who did not have the advantages that I did. It took me a long time to really understand that, and to admit it.

The Jersey office was actually a printing plant, and we took up one windowless room where long cafeteria tables served as shared desks. The building was just barely in sight of the Statue of Liberty—but only the backside, like New York was telling us to kiss her ass. The first day, I was so afraid I’d get lost on the way there that I showed up almost an hour early, overdressed and terrified.

People say when you’re in prison that you’re doing time—like it is a thing you will do and it will be over. But then you get out, and you discover that there is more, as if the wasted hours and minutes follow you around and now your life is about reversing them, making good, undoing time. And when I looked at what I’d done with my time, I wondered: Was it enough? Would it ever be enough?